If service of providing compressed moving images is provided by broadcasting or through the Internet, for example, the upper limit of frame frequencies that can be reproduced is limited depending on the decoding capability of a receiver. Therefore, the service provider needs to take into account the reproduction capability of a widely used receiver to limit the service to a service with a low frame frequency, or to simultaneously provide services with a plurality of frame frequencies, i.e., a high frame frequency and a low frame frequency.
The receiver costs a lot to support the service with a high frame frequency, which is a inhibiting factor for early widespread use of the receiver. If inexpensive receivers dedicated to the service with a low frame frequency only are widely used at the initial stage and the service provider starts the service with a high frame frequency in the future, viewing is not possible in the absence of a new receiver, which is an inhibiting factor for widespread use of the new service.
For example, the time direction scalability in which image data of each picture constituting moving image data is hierarchically coded in h.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) has been proposed (see, non-patent document 1). On the receiver side, it is possible to identify the hierarchy of each picture based on a temporal ID (temporal_id) inserted in the header of a NAL (Network Abstraction Layer) unit, and thus to perform selective decoding up to the hierarchy corresponding to the decoding capability.
Non-Patent Document 1: Gary J. Sullivan, Jens-Rainer Ohm, Woo-Jin Han, Thomas Wiegand, “Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard” IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECNOROGY, VOL. 22, NO. 12, pp. 1649-1668, DECEMBER 2012